Discussion Question:

Think about your favorite book. How did the setting affect the plot of the book? How did it affect the characters? Could the book have taken place anywhere else or in a different time period-Why or why not?



Annotated Bibliography:

Berk, Ari. "Of Travels and Travails - Imagination, Landscape, and Narrative." Language Arts Journal of Michigan 16.2 (2000): 28-33. Print.

This article explains the importance of ambiguity in storytelling so that the readers or listeners can make the story personalized to their own experiences and imagination. The author discusses the importance of landscape, movement, characters, and artifacts in constructing a narrative. The article also contains an extended example of the author's narrative writing and how it includes the important factors of narrative writing.

Cavanaugh, M.P. "A Sense of Place: Consider it Seriously." Language Arts Journal of Michigan 16.2 (2000): 1-3. Print.

This article discusses the importance of a sense of place in both reading and writing, and how to convey that importance to students. It stresses the importance of an integral setting over a backdrop, the four parts of a setting (location, weather, length of time, and time period), and showing students a wide variety of setting examples from literature. Finally, the article discusses how essential it is to give students the opportunity to have a deeper sense of place in what they read so that they may stress setting in their writing as well.

Jeremiah, Milford A. "The Use of Place in Writing and Literature." Language Arts Journal of Michigan 16.2 (2000): 23-27. Print.

This article examines how place is used in the expository writing that students produce and the literature that they read. It also discusses how place can be a starting location for writing ideas as well as an opportunity to teach the features of grammar. Overall, the article focuses on how educators can incorporate the different definitions of place into their curriculums.

Jonna, Heather. "Warning: This Book is a Time Machine." Language Arts Journal of Michigan 16.2 (2000): 34-36. Print.

In this article, the author discusses her experience of incorporating place into her students' social studies and writing curriculums. The author explains her process of having the students read about the diffferent time periods about a single place, and then having them create a class book about their own "places" with both writing and drawings.This experience not only brought different curriculums together, but gave the students as sense of appreciation and interest in their own community.

McKinney, Caroline S. "A View from the Roof." Language Arts Journal of Michigan 16.2 (2000): 10-13. Print.

In this article, the author examines the importance of integrating setting with character perspective. The author uses the book Getting Nearer to Baby as an example to show how a changing perspective can alter a setting. In addition, the author discusses the importance of having students read books from the perspectives of others that are different from themselves so that they might have a better understanding of the physical and cultural world around them.